Does Jesus Live, or Has He Only Lived?A Study of the Doctrine of Historicity

van den Bergh van Eysinga, 1930

This is Klaus Schilling's summary in English of G. A. van
den Bergh van Eysinga's 1930 article "Leeft Jezus - of Heeft Hij Alleen
Maar Geleefd?Een Studie over Het
Dogma der Historiciteit".This short book is dedicated to Arthur Drews.van Eysinga comments on many topics that had been covered by
Drews, such as in "The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and
Present", and draws additional conclusions.Edited, formatted, and uploaded Oct. 5, 2003 with
Schilling's permission by Michael Hoffman; additional copyediting by James
O'Meara.

Many people today are tired of
religious dogmatics.The twelve
articles of confession, or the Nicean and Apostolic creeds, are fundamental for
Christian belief as expressed in the churches.

Whatever is said in these creeds about Jesus, it is usually
considered to be the view held in common among all Christian churches: God's
monogenetic son, our Lord, was conceived through the Holy Spirit (Hagion
Pneuma), was born from Mary the Virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was
crucified, died, was buried, descended to Hell, was raised from the dead after
three days, ascended to Heaven, sits at God's right-hand side, and is going to
come in order to judge both living and dead.

Nobody should fail to see that these are words about a
superhuman, divine being.And all
of the elements of the creed are already contained in the New Testament.Not until the modern Enlightenment
period of the 18th century did we start to consider and pursue the quest for a
merely human Jesus.

An outstanding human preacher replaced the former "son
of God".This lead to the
modern-era phenomenon of the liberal Jesus cult: the veneration of the optimal
human being, the perfect Rabbi, whose example is to be followed.

Many scholars, such as Harnack, make the error of projecting
this post-Enlightenment point of view into the ancient times.Modern liberal theology thus propagates
the image of the Galilean genius teacher, adapted for the pious minds of our
times, whereas Volkmar tried to explain most of the New Testament material from
mythic influence from the Old Testament.

Bousset emphasized at a congress on liberal Christianity
that the coherent facts on the life of Jesus barely fill a sheet of paper.The preaching of the gospel is a
chaotic mixture of church traditions and possibly real words of the Lord.What the gospels unveil about Jesus'
emotional life is painted over by the traditions of his communities.The carelessness of the Jesus biographers
should thus be ended.

Albert Schweitzer denounced the miserable state of modern
theology which tries vehemently to mix history into theology.The Historical Jesus is seen by liberal
theologians as the noblest implementation of personality.Dunkmann showed that such a being would
be an utter alien in history, especially religious history.

But each conscious reader of the New Testament must notice a
difference between the image of Jesus painted in the gospels and the one
painted in Paul's letters. Paul
doesn't support what most modern theologians try to make people see in Jesus.

Paul seems to turn Jesus into an imposer of community rules,
a protector patron of the early church through revelations.Paul knows nothing about John the
Baptist, Gethsemane, or the Mount of Olives.Jesus lived, died on the cross, was revived, and all that
for humankind's sake -- that's all Paul seems to refer to.The real life of Jesus is not one of
Paul's concerns.

The most human Jesus is unanimously that of the Synoptics,
especially Matthew and Luke.It's
only in a doctrinal sense that Paul appears interested in the humanity of
Jesus.But one doesn't get any
biographical hints out of the epistles of Paul.Paul presents a myth and divine drama.

Similarly, Jesus being portrayed as world creator can't
possibly be a historical fact in the modern sense.The Epistle of Barnabas
demonstrates that only through incarnation was it possible that man could bear
the parousia (arrival and appearance with power and authority) of the
Christ.The flesh behaves just
like a curtain, as can already be inferred from Hebrews 10:20:
"… since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of
Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain … let us draw
near to God…" Clement of Alexandria sees the flesh as a window to the
Lord.

_________________

The question as it is asked today, whether Jesus is a
historical person or not, is not in the spirit of antiquity.Ancient Christians did not know the
modern notion of historicity.Neither ancient Catholic nor Gnostic theologians talked about a
Historical Jesus.

Marcion denied the fleshliness of Jesus, but Tertullian did
not charge him with denial of the reality of the Christ.Catholics and Gnostics diverged in the
role of redemption.For Marcion
it's a spiritual resurrection, for Tertullian one in the flesh.The concrete carnal reality of Christ
is a doctrinal postulate of the church, as much as his metaphysical efficiency
is a soteriological postulate of the Gnostics.This is reflected in the divergent understanding of the
resurrection: Gnostic 'resurrection' means knowledge of a higher form of
existence, while Catholic 'resurrection' means revival in the flesh.

The Gnostic-Marcionite understanding of a 'resurrected' one
is that of someone who achieved divine knowledge (gnosis), and the term
'death', in the Gnostic sense, means the lack of this gnosis.In contrast, Tertullian ties the
apocalyptic resurrection in the flesh, as derived from the Tanakh, directly to
the unique fleshly existence of the pre-and post-resurrection Jesus.John's gospel contains many remnants of
the Gnostic perspective.

Apart from the sarcasm and polemics that Tertullian throws
against Marcion, it's easily sensed that the relation between the Catholic and
Gnostic view is that between a realist and an idealist.

Gnostic docetism is consequently based on the idea that
matter is the evil principle: Christ, as the extremely Good One, cannot
participate in matter.His birth
and death can be but phantasmic events.Marcion lets Jesus descend straight from the heavens, without being
born.

Cerinthus made the angel-like Christ enter a particularly
sage human at the moment of his baptism down by the riverside of the Jordan,
and leave him at the crucifixion.The epistle of John, a Catholic forgery, in 1 John 4 violently
denigrates the docetic view as the tool of the devil, and in the Apocalypse of
John, as the Antichrist.

The metaphysical Christ of the Gnostics predates the
biological Christ of the churches.As Huikstra showed around 1870, Gnostic topics prevail in Mark's gospel,
where the human character of Jesus is minimal.And even if, as Hilgenfeld showed first, Matthew's gospel
preceeded Mark's, Mark's gospel demonstrates the most original core.Van Manen showed the Gnostic character
of the supposable common ancestor of all canonical gospels.

The whole struggle between Catholic and Gnostic Christians
was thus about a realistic Jesus of the Catholics versus a
metaphysical-idealistic Christ of the Gnostics, not a dispute about
"historicity" in the modern sense.

The Gnostic says that the Christ's essence is a perennial,
spiritual one, whereas this world is woven of phantasm and error.The Catholic says that this world is
divinely created; consequently, the Gnostic Christ is wholly separated from the
world, the Catholic Christ is interwoven with it and participates with it in
the flesh, and Catholic doctrine identifies the creator with the father of the
Christ.

There were Ebionites that considered Jesus as a psilos [?]
anthropos, but this can not be seen as an indication of historicity, because it
happened, like in the case of Catholics and Gnostics, due to merely doctrinal
reasons, not historical ones.There were two sorts of Ebionites: those rejecting and those accepting
the virgin birth, as Origen already pointed out.For the former, the Jewish doctrine of monotheism, stricter
than the Catholic version, does not allow for a God as man, and thus imagined a
particularly righteous man in the natural sense, through whom an angel of the
Lord spoke to and instructed mankind.This has been observed by H. Bauke.

The synoptics still say that John the Baptist is the supreme
one among the woman-born, and lower than all those who will enter the reign of
God.The Manicheans and Cathars
continued to use the concerned passages for their docetism, especially Matthew 11:11:
"I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen
anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of
heaven is greater than he."The docetic view didn't replace an existing realistic view, but, quite
to the contrary, the docetic view eventually was transformed into the realistic
view.

Roman Christianity achieved its decisive advantage over
Mithras and other cults by being able to provide a solid historical background
for their mystery hero, precisely by using the Tanakh.Without the Old Testament, Christianity
would have found itself on a level with Mithras, a hero legend suspended in
mid-air.The Messiah legend of the
Tanakh rooted Catholic Christianity firmly in the world, as opposed to the
cosmophobic Gnostic Christians.

_________________

Pre-Enlightenment Christianity was happy with a supernatural
description of Jesus, as distilled from the New Testament and expressed
undeniably in the 12 articles of confession, and the Nicean and Apostolic
creeds.

With the Enlightenment, the supernatural Jesus was gradually
replaced with a natural Jesus, leading to the liberal Jesus cult.The picture of an outstanding Jewish
rabbi, adapted for modern society, replaced the concept of the supernatural
"son of God".Thus
modern liberal theologians like Harnack erroneously project post-Enlightenment
consciousness back into ancient times.

The works of scholars such as Bolland, von Hartmann, Drews,
and Kalthoff thoroughly refute the implicit assumptions on which Harnack bases
his statements.Only the
prejudices of modern man support the liberal Jesus cult.

G. Volkmar stresses the mythical influence of the Tanakh for
the gospels.W. Brandt sees death
and resurrection as the unique facts known about Jesus, a mix of triviality and
supernaturalism.Van Mourik
Broekman, though a staunch historicist, at least admits that a modern liberal
Christian must always be aware of the possibility that historical facts may be
disproved in the future, including Jesus' life.

W. Bousset sees the knowable facts about the Historical
Jesus as minimal, and painted over by the fantasies and emotions of the early
Christian communities and subsequent church traditions.A. Schweitzer sees the ingenuity with
which history and faith are mixed as merely reflecting the miserable state of
modern theology.

The liberal Jesus is essentially an inflated figure
constructed by post-Enlightenment theology.Dunkmann demonstrated that a Jesus constructed by liberal
theology would be a monstrous chimera, extremely unlikely in history, in
particular in the history of religions.

_________________

According to Dunkman, not much of the Jesus the Historical
Jesus cult dreamt together is found in Paul's epistles.While Luke's and Matthew's gospels may
give the impression of a human Jesus, Paul's writings make Jesus appear as a
patron saint of early Christian community.Paul is silent about such basics as John the Baptist, the
Mount of Olives, Galilee, and Nazareth.Jesus lived, worshipped, was crucified, died, was resurrected, and
ascended, all for the sake of human race.This does not differ much from what is said about the pagan mystery
deities as well.Wrede pointed out
that the author of the letters tried to doctrinally give a human face to Jesus.

Having been born, lived, and died, these are commonplaces
for mankind, not distinguishing features of a biography.According to Juelicher, the
resurrection is the central, core point of Christianity for Paul.What Paul knows about Jesus is a sort
of divine drama.According to the Epistle of Barnabas,
the carnal appearance of Jesus was necessary for man being able to bear seeing
the divine Jesus.Hebrews
sees the flesh of Jesus as a curtain, to protect man from the divine light that
would blind him.Clement of
Alexandria sees the flesh of Jesus as a sort of window.

The question about the historicity of Jesus would make no
sense in ancient times.Neither
Catholics nor Gnostics spoke about a historical Jesus.The difference between Tertullian and
Marcion is spiritual versus fleshly resurrection.For the Gnostic-Marcionite view, 'resurrection' means
familiarity with knowledge about the divine, while 'death' means ignorance of
divine knowledge.The expression
'overcoming death' thus has at least two fundamentally different meanings.Jesus is constructed according to the
divergent understandings of 'death' in the respective communities.

It's a similar opposition as that of realism versus
idealism.Hieronymus seems forced
to state that docetism predates the church, and could be original Christianity.Matter being the evil principle, it
would be improper for the redeemer to be material.Marcion's Jesus descends straight from heaven, without
birth.According to Cerinthus,
Christ did not come in the flesh, but possessed as spirit the earthly man
Jesus.The Christ also returned
Jesus back to life.

While a few liberals like Brandts should not be
uncomfortable with Cerinthus' version, rational theologians now explain the
minor resurrection stories of the New Testament as curing of diseases.Catholicism vehemently condemns
docetism, especially in 1 John 4:2:
"This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that
acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God..."

_________________

The pseudo-Justinian
and the Ignatian
epistles as well polemically oppose docetism, while expanding the doctrinal
necessity of the resurrection in the flesh.The dialogue of
Adamantius speaks in the same vein, adding lots of irony to it: everything
must have happened only seemingly, so how may Jesus still claim to be the truth
if everything is feint and fake?This shows the completely different ways of understanding truth,
employed by the divergent persuasions of early Christianity.For the orthodoxy, the New Testament fulfills
in reality what is promised by the Old Testament.This fulfillment must be by a real flesh-and-blood man.

The metaphysical Christ is older than the Christ of the
churches.Most scholars subscribe
to Markan priority.Van Hoekstra
already showed the Gnostic background of Mark's gospel in 1871.Jesus is completely possessed by the
Spirit, but only upon baptism.Human weaknesses of Jesus are hardly found in Mark's gospel.Jesus is presented as standing apart
from mankind.Only demons
recognize him correctly.Even if
we suppose Matthean priority, with Meyboom and Hilgenfeld, this allows Mark's
gospel to be closer to the Gnostic, original gospel.Similarly, John's gospel represents in many aspects an
earlier Christianity than that of the synoptics, although the synoptic gospels
predate it as written compositions.

The most original presumable gospel may be seen as of
Gnostic origin.It denied a birth
of Jesus, but not his reality, albeit in a metaphysical sense.The dispute of early Christianity is
thus over a metaphysical-idealistic versus a physical-realistic Jesus.For a Gnostic, Jesus has to be
thoroughly disconnected from the world, which is seen as an evil principle.The Catholics assume the identity of
the Creator of the world and the Father of Jesus, and reworked the gospels and
epistles to conform to this acceptance of the world creator.

According to Origen, the Ebionites rejected the virgin birth
idea and assumed an ordinarily born Jesus instead, through which an angel of
Yahveh worked and expressed itself starting with the baptismal event, as was
the case with the prophets of the Tanakh.But this is dictated by the strict Jewish monotheism.

Unlike post-Enlightenment scholars, ancient people could
well imagine virgin birth as a reality.Modern-day consciousness relates to that of the Classical era as science
to magic, according to H. Raschke.

_________________

The Acts of the Apostles compares Paul with Zeus, and
Barnabas with Hermes.It's clearly
understood that gods may temporarily turn into humans.In the ancient sense, Jesus may have
led a real life as God as much as a man.The reality of Jesus in the ancient sense does not require flesh-and-blood
reality.The Life-of-Jesus
research anachronistically projects modern notions of historicity and reality
onto the thinking of ancient times, sending common sense amok.But the gospels assume a different
sense of reality.

Marcionites and similar groups refused to think of the
divine in earthly, Jewish ways.According to Tertullian, the common believer back then longed for
escaping from the menaces of postmortem penalties in hell.This required the flesh-and-blood
reality of the savior, born from a human mother.But that would be a ridiculous contradiction in the creed,
which supposes a monogenetic son of God.

The ordinary birth also conflicts with a gospel statement
that John the Baptist is the most elevated among those born of a woman,
implying straightforwardly that Jesus isn't born in the vulgar manner: Matthew 11:11,
"I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen
anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of
heaven is greater than he."

Antidocetic dogmatics thus occupied a great deal of effort
in early Christian orthodoxy.This
led to the historization of the idea.The fleshy Jesus was required for the orthodox brand of salvation.In I Corintheans 3,
Paul addresses the hylics who are considered as infants who need to be fed with
baby food, unable to digest the solid food of the pneumatics: "Brothers, I
could not address you as spiritual but as worldly -- mere infants in Christ.I gave you milk, not solid food, for
you were not yet ready for it.Indeed, you are still not ready."

The church adapted this systematically: the food for the
common people had to be a doctrine about a flesh-and-blood Jesus, suffering and
dying as a man, in order to overcome death and thus feed the believer with the
hope for temporal immortality they were looking for.This historization, based on Roman and Jewish practical
realism, allowed mainline Christianity to get ahead of all other cults and the
heresies, whose savior was just an abstract divinity.There's no other way Christianity could have become a stable
popular movement.

John's gospel looks like a compromise.

Until the 18th Century, Mercury and Mithras were believed to
be historical people.Their cultic
hymns are inspired, but not necessarily by historical people: neither is
Euripides' hymn on Artemis inspired by a historical Artemis, nor David's psalms
by a historical Yahveh.The
worshippers of those figures, being thoroughly sure about the existence of
Heracles, Dionysos, and Horos, were not historiographers.As expressed by Bolland, the gospel
Jesus is thus the historization of the idea of Christ, the dying and
resurrecting son of God.

_________________

The Catholic church rejected Gnostic phantastery and misocosmism.They aimed for a practical
demonstration of God's love.The
gospels are thus assumed to invoke the exoteric belief in Jesus, not for
extreme mystics, but for common people around the world.This is only possible with a Messiah
thought of fully as a man.While
Mark's gospel still contains a rudimentary humanized Jesus, this Catholic
concept is realized more completely in Matthew and especially Luke, which can
easily be mistaken as a historical report.Only something the multitudes can understand and identify
with had a chance of becoming a stable popular movement.

John's gospel merges the abstract Philonic Logos with the
historicized Jesus of the synoptic gospels.Loman went further and showed that even the synoptics are
not attempting to provide the impression of a historical report in the sense
post-Enlightenment people would understand it.A reading of Paul's epistles protests against the image of a
biographically determinable Jesus in the epistles.

Thus Christ devolved from the purely spiritual being of the
Gnostics to the "fully man and fully God" of the Catholics, and
finally to the mere man of the liberal Jesus cult.According to Goguel, the enemies of early Christians
criticized the lack of coherence and consistency of the gospels.But this doesn't make them call the
tales "untrue" and their figures "unreal".Guignebert noted correctly that the
so-called witnesses for Jesus outside Christianity are not really worth much.Both Guignebert and Goguel still refuse
to draw the full consequences out of those considerations.

Van Loon wisely did not even ask about historicity and
trustworthiness of the gospel reports, but went straight to the examination of
the character of the gospel tales.Explaining a Historical Jesus from Paul and the gospels is an audacious
hypothesis.The real question is:
which hypothesis may best explain the facts?The liberal Jesus cult just picked out raisins from the cake
of scripture, according to their taste, when constructing their Jesus.

With the flawed methods of the liberal Jesus scholars, one
should also explain Little Red Riding Hood and the snake in the Garden of Eden
tale as "essentially historical".Cuvier and Buffon actually performed this fancy task for
Genesis.Dutch Radicals take a
skeptical stance towards Enlightenment rationalism.Thus van Loon required that we first determine the character
of the gospel story before even being able to think about looking for any historical
sense in it.

Windisch, a Liberal anti-Radical, pretended to understand
the Radical attitude that he denounced vigorously.Obviously he doesn't understand anything at all about the
Radical position, because he conflates Radical Criticism with theological
polemics.Dibelius is a scholar of
the history of form.He declared that
the old way of determining historicity or not of a certain element of a tale is
flawed and must be superceded by a more scientific one, which asks about the
way a certain passage is conveyed to us.

But the old flaws Dibelius seemed to have banned with
the new methods returned through the back door: many elements of doctrines
about Jesus were explained as reflecting problems of organizing community life,
and the remainder that couldn't be explained this way was still thoughtlessly
retained as historical.So the
history of forms brings no real advance over the Historical Jesus cult.

_________________

The book The Christ Myth, when published by Arthur Drews in
1909, provoked a shockwave of reactions.The public impact was evident in the Berlin dialogue and in the
discussion forum of the Federation of Monists.In a protest action by the conservatives, Jesus was declared
to be alive.But such a Jesus
can't possibly be the Jewish rabbi born around 2000 years ago.

Gerritsen claims that the event of resurrection continued to
last through the centuries, and still does.Statements like that make sense once one thinks of the
metaphysical son of God, rather than the Historical Jesus cult's construct.

According to E. Meyer, scholar of history, there's not much
left of the historical Jesus, but it serves as a frame that everyone may fill
with his own colors and figures.Philologist E. Norden, relying on Meyer, thus requires from his
students, when assigned to make a report on a given classical author, to
construct the personality and life of the same, according to the student's own
wild fantasy to supplement the sparsely known facts.The pious mind can't be content with what remains after
liberal critics have constructed the Jesus figure, thus pious fantasy is in demand.

Windisch was upset when radical scholars first appeared in
academic positions.Many
theological faculties, especially German, consider Radicalism to be completely
outlawed.The historicity of Jesus
is essential for the emotional needs of Windisch-like scholars.Windisch called the radical scholars
completely obsolete.For the
Radicals, whatever happened 2000 years ago should not be able to conflict with
the belief of people today.The
liberal Jesus cult insists in a Jesus that has lived once, and can't possibly
accept a perennially living Jesus.

The liberal Jesus scholars frame the question about the
Historical Jesus as a purely and narrowly historical question, thus religious
or theological doctrines and consideration of metaphysics ideas are mandated a
priori as having to stay outside of the permitted range of investigation and
consideration.Schiller's William
Tell makes Swiss patriots feel fine, but that doesn't save Tell's historicity.The mentality of the members of the
Historical Jesus cult is to abandon thinking for the sake of simplistic
belief.The Radical scholars are
accused of being monists that are unable to recognize great personalities.

The stated slavish dependence of the Radicals on Hegel is
without any truth.Bolland may
have represented Hegelianism, but he was already a radical scholar in times
when he preferred von Hartmann over Hegel.The other greater Radicals have been all non-Hegelian
(Pierson, Naber, Loman, van Loon, and van Manen).And one of the most vehement anti-Radicals, Scholten, was
clearly Hegelian.

_________________

In pre-Enlightenment Christianity, the faith in the divinity
of Jesus was the litmus test for Christianity.The liberal Jesus cult turned everything on its head and put
the belief in the human Jesus 2000 years ago in the place formerly occupied by
the divinity of Jesus.Some
Liberals replace the pious rabbi with an apocalyptic prophet, but that's merely
the same type of thing -- a religiously minded historical individual -- in a
different color.

Some Enlightenment thinkers such as Lessing tried to
immunize Christian faith from historical research.Accidental historical truths should not be crucial for faith
issues.According to Kant, history
may well illustrate, but can't possibly verify or falsify religious faith.Historical and religious belief are
firmly distinguished.According to
Fichte, historic knowledge makes you smarter, but doesn't lift you closer to
God.

According to Schelling, Christ is a symbol for the
continuing humanization of God.Hegel sees in concrete history just the point of departure for the more
important ideal history.D.F.
Strauss built on Hegel.The
ultimate unity of humanity and divinity is real in a higher sense.He takes Christ as the idea of the
god-man.

People looking for history in the gospel used to think that
the truth of Christianity could be found in history.

According to Christian orthodoxy, those who write about the
life of Jesus, do so by erroneously abandoning the ideal aspects of Jesus,
while Jesus Myth'ers erroneously abandon the factual aspects of Jesus.Dunkmann also wrote about this
distinction.Thus orthodoxy seems
to be the synthesis of the Jesus Myth'ers and the Life-of-Jesus scholars,
contributing the ideal and factual aspects, respectively.

According to Mark 4:34,
Jesus taught exclusively using parables: "He did not say anything to them
without using a parable.But when
he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything." Parabolic
sayings are not factual historical messages.Thus Jesus exclusively used tales of fictional origin.Parabolic teachings are analogies.The analogy may be accurate, and the
teaching correct, even if the tale is neither simple fiction nor plain
fact.The parabolic tale is just
clothing for the idea it expresses.Naturalist rationalism only divided the possible assessments into fact
and fiction, at the exclusion of a third possible status.

But parable-based teachings show that it's not the case at
all: there's the possibility of validity without being based on fact.The parabolic tale just dresses an idea
it expresses.Thomas Aquinas taught
in his Summa Theologiae that not all of man's fiction is a lie, but senseless
fiction is.Sensible fiction is
not a lie, but is symbolic truth.Otherwise one would call the Lord a liar because he spoke in parables
and pictures.

Parabolic teachings assume the semblance of factual events
in order to express metaphysical truth.It's not for the sake of cheating, but metaphysical or spiritual
enlightenment.Bolland correctly
emphasized thus that everything that is fact may pass away, but truth will
remain eternally.And an
accumulation of facts does not constitute truth.Knowing facts does not imply understanding the essence.

_________________

The worth of Goethe's Faust does not depend at all on the
historicity of that Dr. Faust, let alone that of the events described by
Goethe.Romain Rolland said that
very religious spirits recognize the living god in the traces he left in the
memories of one people, as much as they could have recognized in a factual
incarnation.To the truly
religious person, for whom all reality is God, those are two equivalent
realities.

According to the Vedanta teachers Ramakrishna and
Vivekananda, the historical existence of people they adore is absolutely
secondary; truth has to stand above reality.To be able to teach those truths, the avatars and
prophets of the Vedanta had to be truth.Vivekananda doubts the historical reality of Krishna, while
still worshipping him as the highest incarnation of Vishnu.

In whatever sense Jesus lives, so do Mary, Job of the
Tanakh, and Goethe's Faust.Even
if the hero of a story isn't historical, the author is.Thus the impression that a real man is
"behind" a story can never fail and cheat you.

The authoring of a book describing a Godman is, as
such, a factual event, subject to historical and sociopsychological
studies.Bolland noted that the
gospels still represent the sensible concept of the shining example of the
divine in mankind.

The liberal Jesus cult banished all metaphysical thinking
from Christianity and turned it into a cult of factuality.Clearly the radical scholars upset
people with such a basically and staunchly metaphysical mindset.

Christ can't be seen as an ideal person, but as the ideal of
personality.This ideal is not
from the fantasy of a single person living in a vacuum, but reflects the life
of a community in its social environment, whose voice is the author.The gospel story was received by the
community as a divine presence personifying and fulfilling the religious
feeling of a whole period.Thus
its character is mythical.Later
it was transformed into dogmatism.The Enlightenment tried to dispense with both mythology and
dogmatism.But scholars should not
forget that the gospels were largely written and redacted with the goal of
countering the tendencies of heresies.

Jesus the man is an abstraction constructed by the
Enlightenment, attempting to distill a natural Jesus from supernaturalist
tales.

But even a symbolic interpretation of the gospel tales
employs historiology: the Gnostic author or authors of the most original gospel
must have been some real person or persons living in an actual, particular
social environment and circle.When time was full, divinity revealed itself in history as man or as
certain men, but not in the sense that the gospel Jesus became a particular,
individual, historical personality.

'Reality' is usually translated in two different ways in
Dutch, and those ways are not synonymous.The conflation of them continually causes misunderstandings when talking
about the reality of Jesus and God.He who seeks a historical Jesus -- be it, like the early liberal Jesus
theologians, as a noble Jewish rabbi, or, like the later liberals, as a prophet
supported by an institution -- is he pursuing what was a plain historical
matter, or is he pursuing what was actually the expression of the wish of
humanity for some spiritual type of redemption?

A scholar of history has to research questions of this sort
critically and without bias.Again
the analogy to William Tell as the expression of Swiss desire for freedom is
used in this context.Those
scholars who are also Christians have to understand that the worth of Christian
faith does not actually depend on a specific historical Jesus having lived
around the turn of the era.

O. Pfleiderer said that it's necessary to admit that both
modern and ancient images of Jesus are nothing but creations of humans living
in their respective social environments.G. Bertram wrote that such cool objectivity of the present author's work
merely indicates a lack of historical-methodological clarity.Does Bertram prefer 'warm'
objectivity?Rather, Bertram
obviously thinks that objectivity is impossible.The historicity of Jesus is obviously removed from science
(ordinary reason and evidence) and is made an exclusive affair of dogmatic
belief.

_________________

Many other figures of legend and literature are seen in a
similar light, such as Pallas Athena, Don Quixote, Romulus, Yahveh, and
Osiris.They "lived" in
those real people who contributed to the tales, and are to be understood within
their historical context.So these
mythic figures have a life, but not in the direct sense held by modern
historians.

Goguel noted that many details in the gospels appear in
order to specifically imply the fleshliness of Jesus.This shows that at the time when the gospels were written,
doubts abounded about Jesus' carnality. Goguel wants to put this forward as a proof of Jesus'
historicity.But, just as the
post-resurrection hints of carnality are added polemically against the docetic
school, also the pre-crucifixion part is painted anti-docetically.And this does not make Jesus a
historical person.

Unlike the Gnostic tale of the redeemer descending straight
from heaven (for example, in the Naasseni hymn), the Roman Catholic reformer
needed a "realistic" tale of a son of God in the shape of an
itinerant healer and preacher. Originally, the "realistic" life of Jesus just
consisted of birth, passion, and resurrection, but the Jesus lifestory was
gradually extended.

The celestial Christ of Paul was morphed into a quasi-historical
individual, as Couchoud put it.This gradually increasing reification went hand in hand with the polemic
refutation of the Gnostic heresies.The faith in a "living Jesus" was a necessary forerunner for
the belief in a "Jesus that had lived".The gospel is a parable about the Christ mystery.Raschke's famous formula concerning the
evolution of Jesus from the Pauline metaphysical force of the Gnosis to the
quasi-historical Jesus of the gospels is mentioned again.

According to Goguel, docetism was not an assertion about
Jesus' historicity, but was merely a theological position, so docetism does not
entail a denial of the Historical Jesus.But one would have to admit the same for early anti-docetism as
well.Doctrine just stands against
doctrine, and neither of them centers on asserting historical facts.The ancient type of historification of
the Christ mystery does not turn Jesus into a historical fact.

_________________

Right-winger A. Seeberg considers the gospels to be an
elaboration of the fundamental Christian doctrine of the son of God, sent to earth
for preaching, miracle-working, passion, death, resurrection, instigation of
the apostles, ascension and return to sit at the right hand side of the Father
-- the fundamental facts of Christianity.The gospels thus give a historically styled illustration of the basic
doctrines of Christianity.Bultman
played a similar trumpet.

P.W. Schmiedel seems to reveal a strange sense of humor in
his justification for the liberal Jesus picture.He established nine supporting columns or pillars for this
picture.These purported
supporting columns have been thoroughly refuted by the Radical school, but the
Liberals ignore that.

One pillar refers to a saying of Jesus in which he refuses
to be called "good".The
liberals can't see how the followers of Jesus would invent such a
self-denigration of Jesus.But
this argumentation is flawed.The
Corpus Hermeticum already denies the epithet 'good' to the Logos, and reserves
it for the Father.No one could be
stupid enough to declare the Hermes-Logos as a historical figure just because
its advocates denied its being warranted 'good'.Ptolemaeus Gnosticus says something similar about the
Demiurge.

Another pillar is based on Mark 13:32
and Matthew 24:36,
where the Father alone, no one else, including the son, know about when the end
will come exactly: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the
angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."From this, Schmiedel dares to conclude
the humanity of Jesus.

Another of Schmiedel's arguments concerns Jesus being deemed
foolish by his relatives.This
embarrassment, so the liberals think, couldn't be the work of later Jesus worshippers.But that's pure nonsense, as the
opinion of those relatives, in the eyes of the Christians, just presents the
opinion of the conservative Jewish people, who can't recognize his "son of
God" status.

Schmiedel also uses Jesus' famous words on the cross, about
having been forsaken.But those
are copied almost verbatim from the Psalms and Isaiah.

In Mark 6:5, Jesus admits being unable to work wonders:

Jesus said to them, "Only in his hometown, among his
relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor." He could not
do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal
them.And he was amazed at their
lack of faith. -- Mark 6:4-6

But his inability to work wonders is due to current
circumstances; otherwise, it would boldly conflict with Jesus' usual aptitude
for working wonders.Faith in
Jesus is required, to allow him to work wonders.In no way does this make Jesus humbly confess his mere
humanity and thereby also implicitly assert his historicity.

_________________

Some other of Schmiedel's "pillars" are
dismissed.Windisch did not follow
all of Schmiedel's arguments, but only some of them, adding his own
arguments.The Radicals were tired
of the poor excuses for arguments that were produced by the Liberals.

According to Matthew
11:19, Jesus is a drunkard and a glutton: "The Son of Man came eating
and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax
collectors and "sinners"..."No one would invent this for a worshipped god-like figure, so
Jesus must have been a human -- so the liberals want to make us believe.But that's absurd, because Hercules was
shown in an even worse manner by his believers.One would not prove the historicity of Hercules this way.Windisch understood this as a cheap
parallelism.

Something even more baseless than all of Schmiedel's wobbly
pillars is the common methodological mistake of assuming as most factual those
verses of a report that don't fit the general tendency of the report, such as
the denigration of Jesus in the pro-Jesus gospels.That method may be workable for historical reports, but that
method is plain and utter nonsense, elsewhere; for example, the negative
aspects of Homer's description of Zeus can't be taken as factual just because
they are negative.

Von Soden nonsensically used the congruence of sayings in
the various synoptics as a proof of their authenticity.Juelicher abuses the references to
Jesus' social environment, and the fact that Jesus matches with this
environment, as arguments for historicity.

Guignebert's apologetics don't make those most ridiculous of
mistakes, but he still thinks that for unprejudiced readers, the gospels
contain a sharp outline of Jesus' human existence, because, for example, no
divine being would eat, drink, and get tired.

As opposed to the pre-Roman Hellenic mystery deities, the
Romans developed the concept of the Stoic wise man who represents the ideal of
the divinization of man.This
emphasizes the role of man more than the Greek forerunners did.Finally this picture gets extended to a
divine mystery being that turned into a suffering human for the sake of the
human race.The Catholic realism
fits well with the Roman spirit.The Stoa is the forerunner of Catholicism in this sense.The legendary Heracles and the
historical Cyrus were similarly used in the role of the perfectly wise man.

_________________

For the Socratics, Socrates was the perfectly wise man.Cynics like Antisthenes and Diogenes of
Sinope considered themselves as such.Also two of the early Stoics, Cleanthes and Zeno of Kition, did in a
similar way. The Stoic ideal was
gradually aimed higher and higher.Cicero thus considered the wise man as not yet having existed.Plutarchos plays the same trumpet, also
Sextus Empiricus.Seneca, in a
similar vein, wonders rhetorically where to find him, as even the best
philosophers he knew about were pretty far from the ideal.

But in imperial Rome, Stoicism returned to considering the
ideal of the wise man to be attainable.Thus Epictetus deemed Diogenes and Heracles to be divine, while
Cleanthes, Zeno, and Socrates qualified as wise men.Cato was also seen as an ideal.

One should not be surprised that scholars were tempted to
think that the Christ was alluded to in the writings of the Stoics, especially
Seneca's 120th letter.There
Seneca states that the understanding of the Good one follows an instructive
historical example.By the example
of noble men we conceive a picture that is impossible to obtain by mere
speculative thinking.Traits of
the ideal image have been realized in great men, and were projected and
magnified into the ideal wise man.

According to Philo Alexandrinus, Moses is the incarnate
Stoic ideal of the wise man.Philo
represents the Logos, divine reason, as the High Priest and Messiah.The Logos may be realized only in a man
free of sin, which is deemed to be close to impossible.Mainline scholars use to say that
Philo's Logos is partway between an impersonal spiritual being and an
allegorical personality, and that this is quite different from the Christ of
Christian theology.

But Philo frequently describes something that can easily be
seen as tantamount to an incarnation of God: God may appear as a human in order
to help those who beg for his help.

The Roman church correctly recognized that the idea of
godmanhood, in order to appeal to the multitudes, must be presented in the form
of a human life.Thus as an idea,
the historicized Jesus figure led the Roman church to its success.In John's gospel, the Logos is
incarnated in a similar way as in Philo's writings.John's Christ-Logos is a divine being which is to be
imagined in a human shape.The
synoptics are more thorough in the anthropomorphization of the Logos, but are
not different in essence.Purely
mythological conceptions have no broad propagandistic value.

_________________

For the Cynics, Hercules represents the embodiment of
virtue.The acts of Hercules read
as a victorious struggle against the vices of the world.He penetrated into the underworld, and
returned victoriously to heaven.Thus he opened the way for the followers seeking release from the
bondage of the passions and temptations.The path from earth to the stars is not easy and lightly taken.

The Stoics, successors of the Cynics, forged the Hercules
myth into an allegory about virtue and its representations.Christ unites in himself the Platonic
idea and the ideal of the Stoic wise man.

Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus presents Hercules as the son of
God, appearing on earth in order to suffer for the sake of the human race,
overcome death, and be raised to his father.There are many parallels in a wider sense with the passion
of Jesus, but one does not need to assume a direct impact.It shows instead that the concept of
the passion and sacrifice of the son of God may be germinally traced to Roman
Stoicism.

Guignebert sees the gospels as emphasizing the passion and
resurrection, whereas Jesus emphasizes his own life and works.But those works are essentially
thaumaturgy and are otherwise supernatural.Godmanhood is linked inseparably to the life and works of
Jesus, as an illustration of his role that culminates in passion and
resurrection.

The synoptic gospels should be seen as an attempt to make
the godman appear in a thoroughly human light, for the purpose of making it
appeal to the unsophisticated multitudes, as the exact opposite of the esoteric
elitism of the Gnostic heresies.

Primitive human traits were common in the description of
deities.Kronos is hungry enough
to devour Poseidon and Hades.Zeus
falls asleep through the agency of Hypnos.Wotan cries at the death of Baldur.There's absolutely not the slightest
reason to see such assigning of human traits as anywhere near proving the
humanity of Jesus.

And Jesus does not actually emphasize just his life and
pre-crucifixion works.But the
consoling role of his death is anticipated in various spots in the
gospels.If one dismisses those
passages as community interpolations, one will arrive at a different picture,
but that's blatantly arbitrary.

Many stupid arguments have been invented by those scholars
-- for example, the bread for the children in Mark 7:27 being
the gospel for the Jews, while only the crumbs remain for the 'dogs'; that is,
for the Samaritans and Gentiles:

"...a
woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at
his feet.The woman was a Greek,
born in Syrian Phoenicia.She
begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter."First let the children eat all they want," he
told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to
their dogs.""Yes,
Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the
children's crumbs."Then he
told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your
daughter."

They want to see this conflict between groups as a proof for
Jesus' historicity.But those just
demonstrate the schismatic tendencies in early Christianity, but they can't
possibly be used to prove a historical, fleshly messiah.

_________________

Everything in the Paulinics circles around the crucifixion,
so the crucifixion must therefore be a key article of faith.But Paul never talks about a heroic,
human, altruistic passion -- only the martyrdom for a firm conviction.Paul is as convinced of the
resurrection as the crucifixion.They relate to a cosmic drama, as opposed to an event under Pontius
Pilate.

Guignebert says that Paul is not talking historically about
Jesus, because Paul is a Gnostic and thus glorifies Jesus in a phantastical
manner.Guignebert ironically
makes this into an argument for Jesus' historicity, as Paul could not mythify
Jesus if there were no historical one.This is a cheap rhetorical trick.A typical procedure of liberal critics is to silently assume that which
is to be shown.

Many scholars, such as Goguel, ridiculously conflate the
doctrine of carnality with historical reality.

H.G. Cannegieter pointed out that the gospels are like a
celestial theater play projected down onto earth.The epos suffers from the foreknowledge of the hero.Modern ignorance of the environment
misrecognizes the divine being as a mere man, shifting the dramatic moment from
the hero to the mundane sociopolitical environment.Cannegieter judged that the previous generation of scholars
degraded the New Testament epos to a banality.But the current generation of scholars in the early 20th
Century is no different.

G.A. Huivers notes that all that is written about Jesus of
Nazareth in the New Testament lived in the heart and mind of whoever wrote about
it.

Dr. Vloemans stated that, like all great people in history,
and even more so, the clearly greatest man in history, Jesus, has been painted
over by legends.That's the
infamous recipe of the Liberal Critical School once again: Jesus, who was classically
understood to be a superhuman being, is dithyrambically replaced with the
greatest human being ever, instead of doing one's historiological homework.

Vloemans thunders that the Radical school is easily refuted
by a few lines of Tacitus.But
that's pure nonsense.Even if one
does not consider the annals as a forgery from Renaissance times -- such as
Poggio Bracciolini -- or consider the relevant passage as an interpolation, the
futility of using Tacitus apologetically is easily seen.Tacitus mentions Christians, named
after a certain Christ who lived and was executed in Pilates' Palestine.Tacitus writes this during the times of
Trajan, and may have had access to the legends of the early Christians that
already circulated around then.But this doesn't make those legends history.

Windisch abuses Tacitus apologetically, saying that in such
a short period as between Tiberius and Traian, such a bombastic legend couldn’t
possibly have developed, forming such an extensive enmity to Christianity.But the historical existence of that
hostile attitude is nowhere near provable, and we should suspect that a neutral
attitude was held toward Christianity.

Dupuis already figured that Tacitus might as well have
written: the Brahmani are named after a certain Brahman, who lived long ago in
India.This certainly would not
entitle scholars to assume the historicity of Brahman.Only in the case of Jesus they act
differently.And, if Tacitus had
truly used Roman archives, he would as well have mentioned the name Jesus.

_________________

Vloemans not only moves W. B. across the ocean [?], and
claims that Smith's main hypothesis is that the passion was astral myth , but
also repeats the accusation that Jesus Myth'ers, in this case Smith, Kalthoff,
and Drews, are just Hegelians.Vloemans demonstrates his lack of knowledge of Hegel's works, and still
dares to call himself a scholar of the history of science.

Hegelians are accused of the general trait of denigrating
the greatness of great men, but this accusation is easily disproved by pointing
to the Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of History.Bruno Bauer is similarly accused of denigrating the
greatness of great men -- but Bauer never in fact denied that the author of the
gospel story must have been some truly great man.

Vloemans abused the writings of Flavius Slavonicus as
examined by Eisler, groundlessly presenting that version as more original than
the koine version.The passage in
Slavonicus is almost a summary of the gospel story.Alas, Jesus is not mentioned by name.

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be
lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of
such men as receive the truth with pleasure.He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the
Gentiles.He was [the]
Christ.And when Pilate, at the
suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross,
those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them
alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten
thousand other wonderful things concerning him.And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not
extinct at this day.

Josephus
XX 9:1, the passage about the execution of James, the brother of one named
Jesus, is too suspicious to be used seriously.If this refers to an authentic 'Jesus', it must actually
refer to the High Priest named Jesus bar Damneus, who is specifically mentioned
a few lines later:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road;
so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of
Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some
of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as
breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who
seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at
the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king
[Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for
that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went
also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed
him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his
consent.Whereupon Albinus
complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that
he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa
took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made
Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

Thus it's ridiculous that modern scholars still try to use
the passage as a proof for the historicity of the gospel Jesus.

Eisler's dogmatic axiom is that Flavius Josephus, as a
Pharisee and a friend of the Emperor, must naturally have written against
Jesus.Eisler vehemently pushes
the thesis that Christianity can't be explained without the existence of a
historical Jesus who was a messianic rebel against Roman imperial presence and
the temple militia.

Liberal professor van Plooy, who employs Eisler as a comrade
in arms against the Radical school, says that for the Jesus Myth'ers, who deny
the historical Jesus, documents like Flavius Josephus are disastrous.But Eisler makes Jesus into a
militaristic zealot, thus the remedy becomes worse than the disease.Therefore Plooy retreats to saying that
the witness value of Josephus isn't really that great.The gospel data are much more
plausible.But what data?

After van Plooy's retreat, Windisch thunders Flavius
Josephus against the radical school, ignoring that Jesus isn't even named as
such.

Both van Plooy and Windisch also ignore Eisler's statement
that there's no reliable information about the historical Jesus to be found in
Christian sources.

van Plooy thunders that even if there were no extrachristian
witnesses for Jesus' historicity, the Radical paradigm would have to be
abandoned before long, because the multifarious early Christian communities
that existed in the first two centuries can't possibly be explained without a
historical Jesus.In history, the
individual personality is always of priority, never the social environment.

_________________

But not all of the men that gave raise to large movements
are even known by name.And they
may not be confused with the legendary heroes the movements adored, in the case
of founders or reformers of religions.The prophesies of the Tanakh were works of historical prophets, but one
may not conclude that Yahveh, whom they worship, was a historical man.

Since earliest times, the Talmud was misused to support
Jesus' historicity.Windisch does
so, pretending to build on J. Klausner and Eisler.

The epithet "ben Panthera", found in the Talmud,
is of particular interest.Klausner derives 'Panthera' from the Greek term 'parthenos', meaning
"virgin birth".Windisch
follows silently.But why would
the rabbis need to use the Greek term 'Parthenos'?This epithet for Jesus couldn't possibly have originated
from orthodox Jewish oral tradition, but rather from the gospels.

The derivation from the above is not likely, anyway.And the similarities between the
gospel's Jesus and the Talmud's ben Panthera are vague.The late dating of the Talmud makes its
independence from gospels and other Christian sources unlikely.

Many other Talmud figures have been identified with gospel
figures.Jacob of Kephar Sekanj,
student of Yeshu Hannosri, has been read as James, son of Zebedee.

According to Windisch, the Tanakh doctrine of the Messiah is
the backbone of the New Testament savior.From this, Windisch derives the historicity of Jesus.For how could the Christians declare
that the Christ has come, if Jesus was not a historical personality?But that argument is ridiculous,
because the mainline Jews never believed in the messiah of the gospels.

In addition, from the Book of Enoch we
infer that Enoch is called the "son of man".Would one infer from this that Enoch
was historical, too?The letter of
Judah relates that Enoch was a prophet, just like Windisch's Jesus.So why does Windisch not defend Enoch's
historicity?

The messianic element should be seen as part of the later
Judaization of the original gospel.

_________________

The church fathers arrived at the dating of the gospels
using the Tanakh prophets, especially Daniel.The name 'Jesus' is derived from Yah(veh) and sosei
(absolves), in agreement with Matthew 1:21:
"She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins."

J. de Zwaan thinks it impossible that Alexandrine diaspora
Jews could have made up the teachings of Jesus as told in the gospels.According to de Zwaan, diaspora Jews
who were educated in Hellenic philosophy couldn't possibly have thought that a
Jewish rabbi was crucified under Pontius Pilate, descended to the underworld,
preached to the demons there, was resurrected in the flesh, and then ascended,
because the idea of resurrection in the flesh was too unphilosophical for them.

But that argument anachronistically ignores that the
resurrection of the flesh is merely a secondary development in Christian
doctrine.The Gnostic and
Marcionite Christians didn't support a fleshly type of 'resurrection'.The resurrection of the flesh is
consequence of the Judaization that was necessary in the process of making
Christianity a religion for the common people.

De Zwaan also ignores the words of the prophets of the
Tanakh who form the basis for the crucified Jew as a mystery god.De Zwaan's rhetorical question
"What philosopher could have come up with a story of a worshipped
crucified Jew?" is thus ridiculous.

Drews' statement about Christianity depending vitally on
Jesus conceived of as a man goes too far, and assigns too much competence to
the clerics, as if they had the monopoly to decide who or what is
Christian.History knows about a
variety of versions of Jesus that have as much claim for authenticity,
including the Jesus of the docetists, a metaphysical principle; the Jesus of
Hegel, the idea of the unity of man and god; and other versions.The prejudice of thinking that the best
conceptions of Christianity and Jesus must be the earliest conceptions has to
be overcome.

The attitude of the Dutch radical critics is neither that of
a medieval nor Enlightenment believer, but that of a modern researcher, looking
for the deeper sense of circulating concepts and forms of belief.